Welcome to my information security blog. I hope the information I publish and comments I provide can offer some insight, for better or worse, into current industry trends, technologies, and innovations.
One of the purposes for this blog is to encourage creative and constructive dialogue, so feel free to comment. If you do, please provide your name.
If you have any feedback or would like to contact me offline, don't hesitate to email me: mike[@]cloppert[.]org

2008-04-06

On Blaming The User

I've written previously on how blaming users is a flawed approach to security. Recently, in an interview with Educause, Bruce Schneier opined:

Users are going to pick up their knowledge from their experiences. You can try to teach them stuff explicitly, but it's not going to stick in the same way that experiences do, and unfortunately, the experiences often don't match our reality, whether it's an experience of fear, an experience of an attack, or an experience of no attacks. Rather than focus on what can we do to educate users, we need to focus on building security that doesn't require educated users. That will be much more resilient, because while there are some educated users, there are a lot of noneducated users.... For example, my mother is never going to be a security maven—not because she's stupid but because it's not her area of expertise. And we can't expect it to be. If I say, "Look, Mom, you didn't know enough to do this and that, and you deserve to get hacked," I think that's blaming the victim....(Emphasis mine)

Users aren't going to act securely. It's worth reiterating this message until the security industry finally decides to "get it" and start accepting responsibility for security problems, rather than passing the buck.

No comments:

About Me

I have been employed in various information technology fields since 1997, and in information security since 2001. I have an undergrad degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Dayton, received various industry certifications (GCIA, GREM, GCFA, etc.), and am currently pursuing a MS in Computer Science from George Washington University. I have lectured on various information security topics to IEEE, internal organization-wide IT conferences, and the annual Department of Defense Cybercrime Convention. My international work experience consists of training on general information security topics and IDS design/implementation onsite in Egypt, Israel, and India, as well as providing incident response assistance in the Far East. I have been a contributing editor to incident response procedures for two major organizations, and have been involved in digital forensic investigations since 2001. Currently, my work consists of security-related research and development, covering topics from vulnerability and exploit reverse engineering to implementation of security technologies, as well as digital forensics for an enterprise Computer Incident Response Team.